1 December 2007

Somehow I missed that (either the Mac version wasn’t available when I last heard about it, or I just didn’t find it): special wallpapers that are updated every minute to show the current date and time — not as a dumb overlay, but visually integrated into each wallpaper. Check out the gallery, and install it. There’s a 30-day trial for Windows, but the OS X program is completely freeware (and perfectly functional).

I like seeing steampunk blimps fly above a gritty city as much as anyone else (the setting is eerily reminiscent of TimeShift, by the way), but I don’t quite get the point of inventing a story about vampires being the result of genetic engineering and the cure to all human diseases, if it’s going to take place in an alternate future-past. Good vampire stories are all about what’s lurking in our shadow; who cares who they are and where they come from when the story isn’t taking place in our universe?

Anyway… pretty photography, boring direction and dull actors (oh, and laughable stunts). Too bad, I like original takes on vampires and demons.

Free, ad-supported. If it worked correctly in my old Parallels, I’d regret buying the Xbox Live version — unsurprisingly enough, the game is a million times more playable on the keyboard than with a pad. (You can also use the mouse, but I didn’t try that; I’m an old-school Tetris player.)

6 December

I receive @replies from people I follow under the condition that I also follow the person they are replying to. This setting is ideal for those who seeking the happy medium in Twitter interaction, as @replies are still visible, but restricted to mutual followers.

Excellent. You might be losing 0.1% of the stuff you could have found interesting (and it does reduce the chances of randomly discovering other Twitter users), but mostly this makes it possible to follow the Scobles of this world. If you wanted to. Which I have no idea why you would.

7 December

I never really share everyone’s enthusiasm for Pixar movies — there’s always something missing or something too much that screams of design by committee.

In this case, the rats are amazing and there are some excellent scenes, but it’s all wasted by way too much of the irritating humans. Plus those stupid morals about how stealing is wrong. They’re rats, for crying out loud.

And I wish I hadn’t watched the English version. Listening to actors fake diverse levels of outlandish French accents for a hundred minutes is really painful.

It’s hard to justify making a movie from a show that’s still going — a canceled show, like Futurama, can afford to release so-so episodes bundled together as a DVD, but when it comes to the Simpsons (which has to be the most popular comedy show currently on air, as low as it’s sunk) it’s much harder to provide something worth your time and money.

Oh my god her first word!

So let’s cut them some slack and say this long episode had the best jokes the Simpsons had in a decade. Which isn’t saying that much, but still. I wouldn’t be pissed if I’d been to a theater to see it, and it’s more than certainly worth buying the DVD. Even though there’s a definite lack of fresh ideas (and jokes, for that matter) in the second half of the show.

8 December

As if the eternal victim shtick wasn’t unpleasant enough to watch episode after episode, the Harry Potter series needed a creepy fascist-regime plot now. And here I thought those things were called entertainment.

Oh, imagine that — a Neil Gaiman story about a gateway to a magical parallel universe. But, even if it’s not very original, and the twists are too predictable, and the ending is a little too easy (you’d better have an insanely clever reply if one of your characters is going to end up asking “Why didn’t you do that earlier?”), and the director was rather uninspired… a Gaiman story still makes for a very sweet movie.

I think I preferred ‘Mother.’

Did Claire Danes butcher her poor eyebrows by herself, or was it for the movie?

P.S. Disclaimer: I watched this movie at 10am. (For some reason I couldn’t sleep anymore.)

10 December

Well done, and not particularly interesting. It doesn’t really work to have a whole trilogy dedicated to shooting chase sequence after chase sequence, and only deliver such a lame payoff at the end. (Although I guess it makes sense to downplay the plot itself considering that it’s based on ancient novels that have already been adapted before.)

I’d heard conflicting opinions about the big Tangiers fight, but I thought it was very efficient — while it’s insanely frustrating in a Transformers fight scene to have the camera struggling to keep up with the action and show anything significant on screen, it’s actually quite a good way to express the intensity of a bare-handed fight between two trained assassins, both acutely aware that only one will come out alive.

Although it may quite possibly work better on the small screen than in a theater.

I’ve heard everyone, friends and strangers alike, rave about the Harry Potter books for years; I’ve watched all the movies so far, and clearly appreciated that there has to be a much more interesting, detailed universe to be discovered by reading the books. And yet I’ve never ever felt like opening one of them. Not curious in the least.

Now it’s been two days since I found out what The Golden Compass is about, and the book joined the Mass Effect novel at the top of my private Amazon wishlist (which I might make public for Christmas just in case, because that paperback costs as much as six ramen meals! outlandish!).

I used to wonder if I was more prejudiced that I thought about kids’ books, but that proves I’m not. For some reason I just don’t seem to care about a school for magic, and a goddamn persecuted orphan out to save the world with his friends; whereas a parallel universe where you have talking animals for soulmates… now that’s fucking awesome. Even if the story seems to be centered around another dickensian orphan — I can feel in my bones that she’s not going to be as much of a pathetic whiny victim as that annoying egomaniac wuss.

So I’m gonna have to avoid the movie. Which is a shame, considering: talking animal soulmates.

The demo is online, and it doesn’t disappoint: the graphics are flawless (except for rubber smoke looking much more old-gen than in the screenshots), the free-roaming aspect and the instantaneous races are well done, and the rest is faithful to the Burnout franchise. Unfortunately for me.

Now I can only wait until Project Gotham Racing gets into this big-city meme, after the Test Drive and Burnout franchises. And if there’s a name that warrants that kind of game, it’s “Project Gotham Racing,” isn’t it?

In any case, at least the demo is a must-download, and I’m confident that it will sell a lot of copies.

After Blacksite delivering messages about the war in Iraq or whatever (I’ve only played the demos, and didn’t pay that much attention to the reviews), now Frontlines shows its cards right from its title, exploring the consequences of the industrialized world’s dependency on oil.

True that the FPS is a well-known, well-mastered genre now, and you need to bring something different to the table; the main originality of Frontlines, besides the gameplay making you “capture” zone like in an online shooter (which isn’t too bad an idea), is the inclusion of drones, mini-tanks or mini-choppers that you control to accomplish some objectives. What could go wrong with remote-controlled gadgets?

Well, that was assuming that the FPS genre is well-mastered in the first place. Which, obviously, it isn’t: while the guns’ feel seems rather realistic (by which I mean you play as a pussy with no arms, who can’t lodge more than two bullets in a target with a machine gun), the controls are very unpleasant (you have to click the right stick to switch to the scope, and click again to toggle it off, which takes a couple of seconds each time — for a game that’ll come out in 2008, that’s just not possible) and become downright unusable when you’re controlling vehicles: I hated driving the tank, and I still can’t figure out how the wheeled drone is actually supposed to work. Which is a little of a bummer, considering that’s the whole point of the game.

But they don’t really intend to sell this anyway, do they? Especially if they’re releasing the demo two months before the game, while everyone’s playing Call of Duty 4.

18 December

First video of a city track: even though the building models look accurate, and the cars are still photo-realistic, I find the result much less attractive than Project Gotham Racing 4. And there’s still that unbearable screeching.

Guess that still isn’t the game that’ll make me regret not having a PS3.

20 December

Peggle, PopCap’s hybrid of pachinko and Arkanoid, is finally available for Mac (and it was evidently a complicated port, judging by the occasional frame drops), and I suddenly have a much better understanding of why some gaming podcasts dedicated hours and hours of programming to this game. It’s impossible to explain; you just have to try it for yourself.

I can’t in good conscience advise that you download Peggle. But, if you do, be prepared not to let go of it until the 60-minute demo has expired, and to whip out your credit card as soon as it’s over. I think I’ll just delete the demo and dmg to make sure I don’t end up buying it — I’ve resolved to cut down on those kinds of endless time sinks for 2008.

That was shaping up to be an intense season finale if only it had focused on the confrontation with Doakes. Dexter has way too many guardian angels in this show — didn’t something comparably fortuitous and silly happen in season one?

Obviously there was a very cathartic scene for the audience somewhere in there, though.

21 December

22 December

GameVideos offers several videos showing the Xbox 360 remake of Rez, making me instantly realize why this game has been so fixed in everyone’s memory, and also how it’s connected to Lumines. Even more importantly, I now understand how it’s played; I’d had a little trouble making sense of the screenshots I’d seen before.

Trippy. I think I should hire someone to play it while I watch — it looks so cool I don’t feel like spoiling it with the frustration of dying every five minutes. Because my gut tells me I’m gonna suck at it.

28 December

As unoriginal as the topic is, this writeup is intelligent. I suck at designing logos, so I avoid them altogether, but if I had to do one during the course of 2008 I’d come back to this article for inspiration.

(I’d be happy enough to produce a logo that doesn’t look like crap — I couldn’t care less if it was outdated by one year. Those things are supposed to stand the test of time somewhat, aren’t they?)

Looks like Art Lebedev is learning from his mistakes: after going to Hell and back in the process of turning the Optimus Maximus concept into something functional, and remotely reminiscent of the original design (nevermind switching from black to white body, or making an odd keyboard layout to avoid having too many key shapes; the real limitation is that every screen is a tiny square that only occupies a portion of some keys’ surface), he presents the Tactus, which is just one big touch-screen.

Sure, it’s going to be hard finding a screen with this aspect ratio; sure, that means entering a patent minefield; sure, a tactile keyboard is a usability nightmare; sure… uh… yeah, so much for praticality and learning from your mistakes. That’s not gonna fly either.

So… I burned through the three books (Northern Lights / The Golden Compass; The Subtle Knife; The Amber Spyglass) in the course of 72 hours, and two days later I’m still not sure what I want to write about them.

As soon as I found out about the subject — some kind of alternate universe where you don’t wear your soul inside you but outside, embodied in a companion animal — I was hooked, and I wanted to see how the story was really developed and not limit myself to whatever could fit in a two-hour Hollywood movie.

I was right to want to read the novels: the story is so dense I can’t imagine how you could reduce each book to a single movie script (I know that’s also true of Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, for instance, but the bottomline is I don’t care about whiny orphan sorcerers and whiny dim-witted hobbitses and OMG I just figured out a trend here) and, while the author’s style is not spectacular, it’s efficient and straight to the point — quite cinematographic, one could say, if one could imagine that word not being an insult.

The big disappointment, though, was the lack of what I really hoped to find in the book that couldn’t possibly translate well into the movie: a coherent explanation, a real theory, of why those people have their souls outside of them and how that works. To be sure, the daemon thing is not a gadget — it’s really central to the first volume, and quite nicely exploited in the other two — but I could never really get over the fact that it makes no sense and, more importantly, that there’s no clear definition of what part of the characters’ personality lies in their heart/brain, and what lies in their soul/daemon. One of the books actually separates some characters from their daemons, and yet they don’t appear to act or think differently; if the soul is neither your emotions nor your conscience or, I don’t know, the center of your rational thought, then what’s your daemon really more than a talking plush toy with an uncanny gift for empathy (and an additional pair of eyes so you can watch behind your back)?

But that’s not so bad; the story is strong enough to make you want to go on, despite the kind of nitpicking I can’t really ever let go of. What is bad, however, and more distracting from the story, is the author’s anticlericalism — if you thought that Christian associations protesting the adaptation on movie screens were out of line, well… consider this: I’m an agnostic, raised an atheist, and the author’s attack on the Christian religion is so violent that I would think twice before stocking those books in a school library. It’s one thing to depict an alternate-reality Vatican as a worldwide dictatorship (they’ve kinda been there and done that); but what Pullman establishes in the third book is heinous, and properly insulting to anyone who believes in one God, and that’s a lot of people. I don’t mean that it’s a bad story or it shouldn’t be told, just that it’s quite impolite, in a way, and that it shocked me out of solidarity with my believer friends (and I’m not sure I have any). Or maybe it’s less the story than the way it’s being told.

Which brings me to the part where I’m glad I read the books but didn’t buy them (Thanks, rhino75): I don’t think I like this Pullman person very much. Nevermind writing a whole trilogy against religion (and making it all about destiny and religion, only pagan and new age-y); what really stopped me in my tracks was reading that dull people have dull daemons, and all manservants’ daemons are dogs and all maids’ are hens (if I remember correctly — the dogs are mentioned at least twice, but I’m not so sure about the hens). Erm… I’m sorry, that’s not something I’d much like to write, or read — and particularly not in a novel that’s purported to be for “children and young adults.” Yeesh.

And yet, like I said, I really am glad I read the books. Because the story is interesting, the universe is original, and the plot twists are… well, let’s say you really should read the trilogy before they start promoting the third movie, because you’ll want to save yourself the surprise of what’s going on there — by the way, I can’t wait to see how they handle the adaptation, if they removed any reference to religion from the first movie. (And the trilogy would make a very nice two- or three-season TV miniseries, if it were at all possible to produce a TV show with such a subject matter.)

Recommended, then, not because it’s a masterpiece, but because it’s an original perspective, and a break from those whiny orphan sorcerers.

When you minimized Safari windows (for instance), then closed the last open window, I’m pretty sure the system would unminimize a window for you (which I found annoying, because if I minimize a window I want it to stay that way); I noticed yesterday that it didn’t happen anymore. Did Leopard fix this?

When I typed too fast and my browser was too sluggish (it was usually the browser, but it could be something else), the circumflex would stick if I pressed it so that OS X would try to apply it to every letter that had been typed afterwards until the sluggishness had subsided (so I often ended up with something like “je vais ê^t^rê^ê^n^retard”); I just noticed it didn’t seem to happen anymore. Did Leopard fix this?